


he has found himself abandoned in the end, his faithfulness repaid with scorn!

by jonphaedrus



Category: Die Zauberflöte | The Magic Flute - Mozart/Schikaneder
Genre: F/M, Family Dynamics, Frottage, Identity Reveal, M/M, Slow Build, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 10:24:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12430821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: And that was when they began to call him The Speaker.





	he has found himself abandoned in the end, his faithfulness repaid with scorn!

**Author's Note:**

> betad [dream](http://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates) who did an amazing job and i only wish id been able to do more w her edits but.....for the next edit.
> 
> if you think that sarastro isnt paminas father, youre lying. if you think that the speaker and sarastro didnt fuck then well im here to tell you i disagree. title is straight out of the libretto ("Verlassen sah er sich am Ende, Vergolten seine Treu mit Hohn!," from the two priests/bewahret euch duet in act 2).
> 
> based loosely on the 2014 dutch national opera production of die zauberflöte as stage directed by simon mcburney. and specifically that one time that sarastro realises he fucked up and looks at the speaker and the speaker looks at him like DUDE. UMMMMMM.
> 
> anyway i got really invested BYE

He remembered when the King of the Night had died. The world had been lit up for three days and three nights as stars had battled against the cloth of the sky; the forces of nature, loosed at last, turned upon one another like rabid animals. For those three days, he had cared for the books in the library, the bright lights flashing through the high clerestory windows casting strange shadows over the backs of his hands, making his pale skin blue and grey and purple, his veins dark as ocean water. He stared furtively out the window at each sunrise, watching as the Queen of the Night clung to the status quo with tooth and claw, and against her the King asked for they knew not what.

At the end of it, the sun had risen, but only in the east, its rays stretching long across the countries that made up half the world, the furthest edges of light scattering over their stucco walls. It had never again crossed the dividing line into the Queen’s hereditary territory, the darkness there fallen as thick and impenetrable as a shroud. His fellow men of the Order of the Sun, unsure what to do, had elected to cloister themselves within their walls in the Temple of Wisdom on the edge of Night. Their Order had received the King’s blessing, but—

The King was dead now.

 

 

The man that eventually crawled to the gates of Wisdom from out of the darkness was whole and hale in soul, but something desperate seemed to have happened to his body. Blood was dried on his clothes, once fine garments now in rags and tatters, and fine lacerations like those from shattered glass covered his arms and chest and back.

The stranger called himself _Sarastro_ , and he wore at his breast the Sevenfold Circle of the Sun, that he claimed had been given to him by the King of the Night.

It was not in the position of a priest to question Kings, or Sarastros, so he simply guided the man into their order. Sarastro hardly needed it: he adjusted faster than men who had been there decades, taking to leadership in his convalescence. Sarastro’s scars healed as barely-visible golden threads raised against his dark skin, and when his blond hair went to silver and grey and began to thin, he trimmed it from his waist to his shoulders, combed it away from his face, and let it curl in thick ringlets at the back of his neck.

Sarastro was never far from power, and wise beyond all compare, and it was no surprise them all when he was made Head of the Order of the Sun, guiding them with a firm and kind hand. In the absence of the Queen and the King, Sarastro let the frightened citizens flock to the Order’s banner, and more than once Sarastro invited him to stand at Sarastro’s side, laying out judgments and crying his words.

And that was when they began to call him The Speaker.

 

 

“You watch the night,” the Speaker asked one evening atop the astronomy tower, as Sarastro spread the magic of the sun across the countryside, to fields that lay fallow. “What do you think is out there?” Sarastro paused and turned to look at the Speaker, his pale eyes, grey and bright as stars, wide in his dark face.

“The King,” Sarastro said at last, “entrusted me with more than just his magic before he passed. I am meant to guard his daughter.”

The Speaker paused. He was surprised; Sarastro rarely spoke of his past. Who was he to say that Sarastro spoke now a lie? “But?”

“But the Queen is haughty, and does not wish to share her daughter with the likes of me. The likes of _us_.” Sarastro turned away, returning the Sevenfold disc to the breast pocket of his coat. “My magic as it is now could defeat her, but it would destroy us both. I can only hope, soon, somehow, I am able to rescue Pamina.

“Pamina,” the Speaker said. “It is a pretty name. Is that the Princess?” Sarastro nodded. “Well,” Sarastro turned to look back at him. The other man was shorter than he was, of no surprise given the Speaker’s gangly build, and had to look up at him with how near they stood together. “Should you wish it, I know the Order would follow you. If you believe you have the right of it.”

Sarastro, ever-quick to smile, gifted one to the Speaker now. The fine wrinkles beside his eyes softened, and the Speaker found something in him oddly hesitant—paused. Could he have, he would have lived on that smile alone, let the rays of its light cover and warm him.

“Thank you.”

 

 

“Do you have children?” Sarastro asked the Speaker, days later, his book folded and his page caught on his thumb, sprawled boneless in the reading chair in the Speaker’s office. His cuffs were unbuttoned and rolled up to his elbows, his collar open, revealing the long line of his dark neck, the shadow at the hollow of his throat. He needed to shave, golden stubble dusting his skin, catching the sunlight from the window.

“No.” The Speaker set down his pen. “I joined the Order very young; I never married.” He had never missed having children, even now, even in his late forties. “The Order acolytes are my children.” Sarastro smiled, but it did not reach his eyes, and still he did not look at the Speaker. His cheek was mashed into his fist, and he was tired enough that the Speaker could see how bloodshot the whites of his grey eyes were.

The Speaker was, in fact, not entirely sure of the last time that Sarastro had slept.

“There is something on your mind.” It was not a question. Sarastro made a quiet noise of assent, and the Speaker leaned back in his chair, watching the older man as he chewed over whatever thought it was that he was stuck on, taking time to fastidiously set his book aside and put the marker between the pages, rather than mar them with his fidgeting.

“Is it a parent’s job to do what makes their child happy, or is it a parent’s job to do what is best for their child?” His voice came out scratchy with the question, much rougher than his usual mellow spun-gold sunlight tone that was so deep it was like still waters. Sarastro often asked such philosophical questions, but something told the Speaker this was not a hypothetical—something about that ragged, raw voice bespoke deeper wounds and harsher truths.

“What, if they don’t necessarily align?” Sarastro nodded, and then, gesturing with his book as he spoke, explained:

“Consider for me this situation. You are a parent, and your daughter wants more than anything to marry a man who you know is going to make her happy. She will be safe with him, and she will live out her life in pleasure at her simple days. Nothing bad will ever happen to her outright, but she could be so much _more_ if she had the opportunity to be herself. But she does not want to be herself; she wants the low-hanging fruit. You can refuse her the marriage, but to do so, she may never forgive you. But you cannot bear to see her become someone she isn’t, when she has the opportunity to...” he trailed off, pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is a bad metaphor.”

It was. “Are you afraid that she’ll hate you?” The Speaker asked, and Sarastro did not reply for a long time.

“I’m afraid,” he said at last, “that she does not remember me. And perhaps that is for the best; I’m not sure I would want to remember me either. I am afraid that the person I am now, she will hate. And I’m afraid I have no choice.”

“I think if you do something from love,” the Speaker said, “and for her own good, she will eventually understand. She’s not an adult yet, is she?” Sarastro laughed.

“Near enough to. I’ve not seen her in—“ his gaze shuttered then, and he stared at the book held in his hands, the fingers of his other hand tracing the hairline scars that made his face alike to fine kintsugi, gold against the dark of his skin, like the first rays of the dawn against the dark of night.

The Speaker was staring, and he made himself look away.

“A very long time.” Sarastro finished it as last, sighed. “There is no point in sidestepping the issue.” He smiled sadly at the Speaker. “It’s high time I dealt with it properly anyway.”

 

 

The Speaker did not like Monostatos. It had nothing to do with the many reasons the man bemoaned for his shunning by many members of the Order, or the way he looked at women, which seemed to be more sickening at every turn. Oh, all of those things were certainly part of the Speaker’s detestation, but what was truly the thing that made him most ill about the man was the way he looked at Sarastro. The way he dogged, at the other man’s feet, gladly and gleefully taking advantage of his relative rank to enter into his space, to touch his shoulders, his chest, his back. It was the way Monostatos tried to speak for him, like the Speaker did not.

Right now, he very much did not like Monostatos, and it was because Monostatos was currently holding Sarastro up with one hand slung around his chest, under his arms.

The Speaker very slowly folded his hands inside his sleeves, and stared at the tableaux before him. Sarastro, barely conscious, was holding in his arms a young woman no older certainly than seventeen, dressed in the finest of clothes, her feet bare and bloody. Monostatos held up his master, one hand under the girl’s head, supporting her neck.

It was not a good kind of support.

“I will take them from here,” the Speaker told him, curt, dismissing Monostatos, tired of seeing his face, and let Sarastro throw his arm over his shoulder in the slave’s stead, one arm wrapped around his leader’s waist. “Shall I take her?” He asked, watching Sarastro’s face, but he shook his head, unable to speak, and so the Speaker walked beside him through the halls of the Order to a guest bedroom, helped him lay the young woman out on the bed there.

She stirred as they set her down, and Sarastro swayed worryingly as he leaned over her. The Speaker steadied him, his hands on the shorter man’s broad shoulders, broader than his own, as Sarastro sat down beside her on the bed, took his hands in her own. When her eyes opened a moment later, they were almond-shaped and pale grey, like false dawn. Against her tan skin, like sheaves of wheat, they looked all the paler and more luminous, moonlight over fields of grain.

They reminded him of something, although he could not place what.

“You are the man who took me from my mother,” she said at last. Her voice was high and clear as a crystal bell, as quicksilver as running water and as warm as spring sun. It was, in many ways, almost the opposite of Sarastro’s, his own deep bass low and soft as a simmering pot and as heavy as the thick blankets of fog that would sweep over the monastery from the mountains that divided them from the Queen’s endless night. Sarastro nodded, too tired to speak. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. Once, many years ago, when your father died—“ she froze, paused, as he cut off. “It is not important. Your mother is a prideful woman.”

“You say that like she should not be.”

“She is dangerous,” Sarastro’s voice sharpened. “She is dangerous, and jealous, and deeply hateful. Pamina, I hope you may understand that I have done what I did because I have no choice.” She blinked. “You are in the cloisters of the Temple of Wisdom of the Order of the Sun, and you must by necessity stay here, for years of which I am unsure. I cannot let you leave.”

“I,” she froze, her eyes wet. “Who _are_ you?”

“Sarastro,” he said at last. “I am the head of the Order of the Sun, and now, I suppose, your protector.”

She tore her hands from his, and began to cry—hoarse, ugly wailing into the side of her pillow. Each breath pulsed with magic, made the Speaker’s skin feel too-tight and the ground floor of her room shudder, the shutters and window glass rattling. Sarastro, visibly shaken, did not resist as the Speaker led him out, closed the door to her room behind him. In matter of fact, the other man did not speak at all as the Speaker led him back to his own rooms, and he did not look to closely as he helped Sarastro disrobe, Sarastro blindly folding his robe and returning it to its places upon the trunk at the foot of his bed rather than simply casting it aside as exhaustion should normally have warranted. His clothes were covered in mud and dirt and sweat, but not blood this time, and he collapsed eventually motionless into bed, hand clutched around the Sevenfold Disc, as soon as his shoes were properly off. Despite his exhaustion, Sarastro placed them on the mat next to the door, as to not muddy his floor.

His room was as neat as it had been, as if, on the verge of collapse, that one allowance to precision and routine was the only thing that had kept him conscious.

The Speaker knew better than to ask, to demand answers, and sat down at his bedside, and there remained for five days until he awoke.

 

 

“How long have I been asleep?” Sarastro asked, suddenly, in a low afternoon splashed in the purple verges of twilight. The Speaker, startled, turned toward his bed, and found pale grey eyes watching him, greying gold hair spun like sunbeam threads over his forehead and cheeks. He paused, still unsure for a moment of how to respond, and set his book aside. Understanding his hesitance for what it was, Sarastro began to laugh, hoarse and quiet, as the Speaker went to his bedside, sat down beside him. “So long you must hesitate? You need not spare my vanity.”

“Five days.” Sarastro paused. “I was worried about you, I admit that without shame.” Sarastro touched his hand, and slowly pushed himself to sitting up, face pressed into one fist, groaning in pain. He still looked tired, and his skin was grey with exhaustion, but he was _awake_ , and that was enough.

“My apologies for frightening you,” he said, scrubbing his eyes. “How is Pamina?”

“Fine. She’s brought down holy hell on anybody who’s come near enough to her for her to start yelling at them, though.” The Speaker hesitated. “Her magic—“ Pamina’s voice, modulated, could cut glass, shatter windows, _convince_. He’d nearly found himself leading her to the gates at one point. Sarastro nodded.

“Her mother’s,” he explained. “I doubt she can do any lasting harm, as long as she remains technically my ward. When she becomes an adult...” he trailed off, hesitated. “I only hope by then, something in the stars has changed. I’ve no desire to force her to stay somewhere she hates.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and stared out his bedroom window. The setting sun was hanging low in the distance, but it was not to that which Sarastro looked.

Sarastro looked to the night, which hung deep in half the sky, his eyes clearly both seeing and not-seeing, lost in his memories. They had been dormant for so long, his happiness palpable in his new life, but whatever remained in that night for him was paining him again in a way it hadn’t before he had forced himself to return. Pamina was a reminder of it.

Sarastro sighed. “Do you wish to speak of it?” The Speaker asked, watching the older man’s face, the lines beside his eyes and mouth. “What happened before you came here, I mean.” Sarastro didn’t look at him, and his broad shoulders slumped.

“No,” he said at last. “I do not. The person I was then, before—is not who I am now. I am not sure I would want to still be that person. I am not sure I wanted to be that man even when I was him.”

“Did anything good come of it, at least?” Sarastro glanced over at him at last, expression still unreadable. “You think on it so often. I should hope, at least, that you have some good it brought to you.”

“Her,” Sarastro replied, without further explication, smiling. It was pained. “She was all the good I got, I think.” It was the most he had ever spoken of his past, aside from that day he had confided that he had been entrusted with Pamina. “I would do it again, I should think, for her.” He looked so wistful, so distant—

The Speaker did not realise he was doing it until he did so, and he leaned forward, both hands planted on Sarastro’s sheets, red like their order’s colours, threaded with gold and black in plaid, soft to the touch. He had one hand half on Sarastro’s knee, warm and sturdy through the sheets, could feel his corded muscle and body heat and bone and the promise of _touch,_ and kissed him. His lips were chapped with five days of sleep, but warm, and when Sarastro did not pull away but instead leaned closer, their noses digging into one another, returning it, he heard a quiet noise. He did not know he had made it.

Sarastro pressed their foreheads together when he pulled back, his grey eyes shut. This close, the Speaker could see how golden his eyelashes still were, sunbeams against his dark skin. “Thank you,” he murmured, his breath warm against the Speaker’s mouth. “For everything.”

 

 

“Do you prefer your title?” Sarastro asked it suddenly as they returned from an audience meeting, the Speaker’s arms full of papers almost up to his chin, and he kept having to sort through them to hand them to runners or the other man. Sarastro walked with his hands folded behind him as he stepped, and there was always something about his bearing that was regal: the straightness of his back, a _trained_ way of carrying his carriage, his purposeful strides. He always looked directly ahead, his face a strong profile. “As Speaker. You’ve never told me your given name.”

The Speaker was unable to answer for a moment as he finished giving missives, legal paperwork, notes to his runners, Sarastro patiently waiting until he had sorted his stack to half its size before he took the Speaker’s elbow, passed the rest of his stack off to one of their fellow priests. “Please,” he said, to their assembled fellows, a handful of perhaps five or six high-ranked members of the Order, who helped to arbitrate audience days, who kept and filed the notes and records the Speaker had been taking. “Leave us, if you don’t mind.”

They left, filtering out, and the Speaker stumbled after the other man. He always forgot how much shorter than him Sarastro was until they were like this, Sarastro pulling him along gently but inexorably like the pull of the sun around which the earth turned, through the halls to one of the cloister gardens. It was a cool day, a brisk breeze blowing into their monastery out of the Night, that cut through their peristyles and columns and walls, the scent on the air crisp and salty, almost like a cool breeze from the ocean. It was cool enough that Sarastro had even worn gloves that day.

“I don’t care one way or another,” the Speaker admitted after a time, as they walked together. Sarastro held his elbow still, but had shifted his grip so their arms were linked together. He had slowed his step, because even though the Speaker had longer legs, Sarastro moved faster. That focus on productivity again; he was always the first man in any pack, in or out of any room. “I suppose I’ve had no cause to use it, these past fifteen years.” Sarastro looked at him, questioning. “To be your Speaker is an honour. It is a job I am proud to have. I’ve never regretted it.”

“But your name,” Sarastro said again, and then stopped. His fingers were warm on the Speaker’s elbow, hot against the soft inside. Intimate. Burning as sure as did too much sun, turning your skin to red, raw weals.

They were, the Speaker realised with a start, utterly alone. He could not even hear footsteps.

“If you wish me not to call you by name I shall not, but I—I would like to know.” His usual silver tongue was failing him, the Speaker noticed. Sarastro rarely stumbled at all over his words. “For I wish to know you better than I do even now. If you should have a name you prefer, a name that is _yours_ , I should like to know it. None of the other brothers have ever heard you speak it.”

“Hesiod.” Sarastro looked up at him. “My given name is Hesiod. Although I’ve not used it since I came to the Order, a lifetime ago.” Since he had chosen it, he had tried it only perhaps thrice, the sounds strange and foreign in his mind and upon his tongue. “I would be honoured if you were to use it.”

“Hesiod,” Sarastro said, like he was tasting it. When he said it, the Speaker shuddered, his toes curled inside his shoes. The fingers on the inside of his elbow were _scalding_ now, like a brand. He could feel their pressure digging into his bones, cutting through him far faster and finer than could any knife-blade. “ _Hesiod_ ,” he said it again, and the Speaker let out a pained, shocked breath from low in his diaphragm, leaning inexorably toward Sarastro.

Like a planet, around its sun. Like the moon, around the earth.

Sarastro was ready for him this time, and when they kissed it was no tired, chaste meeting of lips. This time, he could feel Sarastro’s beard scraping rough over his chin and upper lip, could taste the hot summer sun growing wheat on his tongue, the brief press of their lips turning deeper, the teeth that mashed against his. Hesiod didn’t know what to do with his hands, his breath caught in his chest like a lead weight. He felt as if he had been a flute he could have _sung_ , high notes so fine and quick that they could have brought the sky to life and light.

Instead, Hesiod cupped Sarastro’s cheeks, leaned down to meet him, and kissed, and kissed, and kissed.

 

 

To watch Sarastro fight with the Princess was a sight to behold. Her temper was perhaps the only in the world that could match his own rarely-roused one for the sheer prodigal force of it, and when she rounded on him in fury and spitting, harpy rage, he met her evenly. Her voice could bring windows shattering to dust, but he never quailed.

It was one such argument, for once _not_ in public, that Hesiod stepped into in the library one day. “Why do you care so much about what I read?” Pamina said, jerking away from Sarastro’s hand, staring back at him. They were almost exactly the same height, her nose was on a level with his. She had no need to inflate herself, like a cat puffing up and arching.

Hesiod noticed that she did so anyway.

“I was merely asking,” Sarastro replied, stepping back and out of her personal space. Privately, Hesiod thought he gave the girl too much leeway. Perhaps a tighter hand would have kept her from lashing out as such. “Those books are usually restricted to the highest members of our order. I was curious as to why you had selected it.”

“Why is that any of your business?”

“It isn’t.” Pamina stopped; taken aback. She hesitated, before she steamrollered on in the way unique to the young, where they could be wrong but still assume they were right regardless. The fine wrinkles at the edges of Sarastro’s eyes turned up as he continued, “A man is allowed to be curious, Your Highness.”

“Then so is a woman.” Pamina shot back.

“Indeed.” Her fury flared as did his, and she had begun to calm now in the face of his sedation.

“Why are you always asking me _what_ I am doing. For all your insistence that you are men of wisdom and learning within these walls, how is it that you know so little of women? How is it that you can insist you know best for me, without knowing me at all?” She paused, and then— “How is it, _Sarastro_ , that you can sit on your ivory throne and call yourself a saviour when you kidnap young women and lock them in their rooms?”

He bristled. Hesiod hesitated, but by the time he considered intervening, it was too late.

“It is made of _brick_ ,” he snarled back to Pamina, as wrong-headed and frustrated as she herself was, arguing semantics rather than substance. “It is made of brick because we are of man and to man we shall return; or had you forgotten your parents sit upon thrones of stardust and moonglow?”

“Par _ent_ ,” Pamina replied. “My father died when I was two!”

“Your father entrusted your care to me, knowing your mother would stifle you, and stifle you she has!” Sarastro pointed at the book she held. “That book is a copy of not only one but _three_ in her libraries, and here you hide it, secret it away. How many times did she take it from you when she discovered your interest in the magic your father left behind?”

“That’s _none of your business_ —“ her voice cracked as she shouted it, and Hesiod winced, tucked half into the open door, as he heard a distant window shatter. “My mother only ever wanted what was best for my safety. She wanted to keep me from the same fate as my father!”

“A fate you hardly even know, insisting he died. _How_ did he die, Pamina?” Sarastro paused, shook his head. “Your mother would have kept you forever as her child, unable to grow, to _change_. The moon cycles, Pamina, but the cycles are _set_. There are only so many faces, and they do not grow. The tides are as predictable as the hours on a clock. If she had never let you leave the night—“

“When I was old enough—“

“She would have _kept you there_ locked in her towers, insisting that not only did she know best but she knew better than everyone else—“

“You’ve never even _met_ my mother, how dare you insist to me that she’s some kind of a monster when _you’re_ keeping me locked up in here?”

“You’re free to go!” Sarastro threw his arms wide. “You’ve _always_ been free to go.” Pamina stared at him, unmoving. “I care not whether you leave or stay, child. You cannot return to your mother’s Night or her arms, not as long as my blessing protects you, for it will not let you enter her realm. But you are free to exit the monastery whenever you like. Walk beyond our walls at any time, any day. You may leave right now, if you like.” Pamina was still staring at him. “Take our books. Read them, learn from them. I brought you here so you might be able to _become_ the person you so dearly wish to be, not to create a girl as miserable as the one you were before!”

The anger had drained right out of him, like water from a sieve, and he turned away from Pamina, his expressive face creased and unreadable. “Your father did not trust your care to me lightly,” he said at last. “He did not do it because he did not love your mother, or because he did not trust her. He did it because he knew you had gifts; he did it because he knew without the opportunity to grow and change as does the sun and the earth, you would be stifled. You would fail at all you are capable of. I _wish_ you would do his memory some credit, and trust me.”

“I hate you,” Pamina spat, venom dripping from her voice, and Sarastro winced, his broad shoulders curved inward, halving the size of his body to be a smaller target—Hesiod could see little cuts peppering his back, the side of his head, the curve of the shell of his ear. “I _hate_ you, and all you stand for. You’re a monster. My mother _was_ right. No men of letters are allowed into her realm, and she was _right_.”

The Princess stormed out of the room, and the library was left in silence.

She took the book with her.

By the time Hesiod had reached his side, Sarastro had sunk into one of the reading chairs, and the black depression that hung over his head like a pall was palpable from ten paces. “Sarastro?” He asked, and the older man did not look at him, his handsome face haggard and worn.

“You saw that.” It was not a question. “I thought someone had...” he trailed off; laughed. “She’s.” He hesitated, seemingly unknowing of what to say. “So much like her mother,” he settled on at last. And then, in an even softer whisper, “So much like her father, too, when he was young.” Hesiod came the rest of the way to his side, set his hand on Sarastro’s shoulder, a reassurance.

“You spoke as if you knew the King before his passing.” Sarastro nodded mutely, did not look up.

“Something like that, yes. You could say that.” Hesiod did not ask for clarity; he knew well enough to leave old pains alone. “She has so much _potential_ ,” he murmured to himself. “I wish she just knew how to use it. She could change the world.”

Hesiod found himself smiling. “I think you’ve little and less yet to worry on,” he told the other man, who still did not look up at him. “She’s young, Sarastro. Foolish. In the way of all who are young. Surely you can remember?” Sarastro’s laugh was deeply pained as he nodded. “You know what I mean, I see.”

“Oh, well enough, well enough. I know it is her fate, as a human, as a growing adult, as a dynamic being, to try and fail and struggle and fall.” Sarastro ran a hand over his face, composing himself at last. He relaxed, body warm and lax under Hesiod’s palm. Now that Pamina was gone, the tension had seeped out of him. Perhaps Hesiod had managed to give him enough safety, too, to let down his guard. “I only wish I could help her prevent the worst of it. It’s only right that I should.”

“From my understanding of such things, limited as it may be to scholarship and academic work, I have no doubt that her father would agree with your desires, but that it would be inevitable for her to suffer anyway. By my own memories of such a youth, children are like to disobey and fight their parents at every turn, be they blood or bond.”

“You are right,” Sarastro replied. “For I am certain that is the truth of it.”

 

 

“Stay,” Sarastro said one night, his thumbs pressing burnmark bruises into the veins on the inside of Hesiod’s elbows, leaning up to meet him halfway, breathing against his lips. Hesiod trembled, a leaf before a gale, leaned closer to chase the bronzed-wheat taste of Sarastro’s tongue, the coppery fire of the latent magic in his voice. “Stay tonight.”

It was already well past three, the stars wheeling overhead, inching past the edge of the Queen’s night into their own, constellations turning and changing with the seasons. Soon enough the light of false dawn would begin to seep into the skies, and birds would begin to sing. It was for that reason that Hesiod said:

“There is precious little left of tonight for me to stay.” Sarastro laughed back to him, husky and warm, and pulled him closer.

Close enough that Hesiod could feel their heartbeats, beating in time.

“So stay until the dawn with me instead,” Sarastro murmured, their lips brushing together, the words lost in the joined hollows of their mouths. “Let me watch the sunrise with you.”

“We have watched it together before; more times than I can count.”

“ _Abed_ , Hesiod.” He flushed; his pale skin showed it like Sarastro’s own loam-dark skin did not, his freckles like firelights against stone, and he ducked his head to try and hide it, like he was a child a third his age. “I mean for you to come to bed with me, and you know it. There’s no honour in false modesty, Speaker.” Hesiod tried to smile, could not meet the other man's eyes, and Sarastro paused, good humour draining, lifted his chin to look into his eyes. Looking for something.

Hesiod flushed. Harder.

“Do you not wish it?” Sarastro asked at last, worry clouding his deep voice, fog against the sun. “I shall not press you, if you do not—“

“No,” Hesiod gasped, grabbing back at his wrists, his elbows, his too-broad shoulders. “No. No, I wish it very much.” His flush built, burning now from his cheekbones to his ears and down like a brand across his chin and neck to the hollow of his throat. “I. There is very little I could wish for more. I just—“

“I know I am perhaps too old and it is somewhat a question you were unprepared for but—“

They spoke it all at the same time, a jumble of confused words piling up on top of one another, the start and stop, source and outcome, muddled. They stared at one another for a long moment, and then together began to laugh, wild and giddy as boys asking for a furtive roll in the hay, and by the end of their good humour Hesiod found himself with Sarastro’s face pressed into his shoulder, his arms around the other man’s broad chest, feeling the pressure of his laughter inside him, the push and pull of the tides of his lungs and the thrum of his heart and blood.

“Yes?” Sarastro asked again; his breath was a hot puff, a brush and burden against the side of his throat. A promise.

“Yes,” Hesiod admitted.

It was different, entering Sarastro’s room now. Subtly. Before it had been as a friend, as a coworker, caring for and given the permission to enter the private sanctum of this man whom he near-worshipped. Now it was a gift, a benediction handed to him. He was entering not just the space but the meaning of it. Hesoid was not merely a visitor.

And, in less lofty and poetic, if perhaps more crude, terms—he entered it with Sarastro’s fingers tangled into his thinning short-cropped hair, his own hands stumbling along with the other man’s belt, their lips and teeth knocking together with every step, Hesoid bent awkwardly at the waist and shoulders to meet him on even ground. As soon as they reached the bed Sarastro pushed him not-unkindly to sit on the edge of the mattress, his knees balanced too-high, and stopped between his thighs. His hair was mussed, his cheeks hot with arousal, his grey eyes eclipsed by the black of his pupils.

“You’re too damn tall for that,” Sarastro said, and Hesoid laughed, touching his hipbones, his hands. “I shall hurt my neck craning up to kiss you.”

“It is perhaps the only gift of looks with which I was blessed,” Hesiod replied, staring back in wonderment as Sarastro undid the belt of his coat, unbuttoning the sides so it hung open, fine red wool parted, shrugged it carelessly to the floor. It was an unusual display of disregard from the other man, so fastidious and exacting, to throw his clothes about. Even when he had brought Pamina back, even as near to collapse as he had been that morning, he had still put everything in its proper place.

It left Hesiod’s heart high in his throat, that he, of all men, should be able to elicit such wanton behaviour from a man whose life was lived precisely to lines and tenants more set in stone than the very building inside which they now stood. Hesiod, who no more could rival the sun in its brightness than could compare the water from a sink to the rivers that rushed to the sea, was _here_ , inside Sarastro’s personal sanctum, at his mercy, at his will.

By their choice, and no other’s.

“You sell yourself short,” Sarastro replied, stepping closer to him, until their knees were knocking. Without his coat Hesiod could see the wrinkled cotton of his shirt, creased from a day trapped within the confines of his well-pressed coat. The collar was half-done, like he had rushed that morning, and Hesiod skimmed his fingers under the hem, pulled it untucked, to feel the heat of the other man’s skin, loose with fat over his hipbones. “Your eyes are as green as fresh-dewed grass, your hair as soft as silk—“

“What very little of it is left,” Hesiod interrupted, and Sarastro shoved him down onto the bed, interrupting him.

“My own is thinning, you cannot deny it.” He couldn’t. “It is the fate of all men. To grow old and wise is to necessarily trade your hair. There is no point in lamenting it as the wiles of a fickle fate. You have gentle hands, and you are kind, and attentive–“

“And I am as gangly as a stick insect, my face looks like melting taffy, I have jowls, you can count all my ribs—“

Sarastro sat back, in genuine consternation, one thigh pressed to the bed beside Hesiod’s own, his other leg balanced on the floor. He spread his hand over Hesiod’s chest, fingers next to the buttons of the shoulder of his own robe, his face a moue of displeasure, his sharp, spun-gold eyebrows pulled down low, his lips pursed. He shook his head. “Can you truly think so little of yourself?” he murmured, his deep voice hardly more than a susurrus. “You, one of the finest men I have ever met, consider yourself so base?”

“I never said I wasn’t fine as a man,” Hesiod replied, sitting up onto his elbows. “Just ugly.”

Sarastro closed his eyes, pained. Hesiod felt deeply regretful of his words, in a way he had not expected.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, not looking at the other man. “I cannot begin to understand what you see in me. You, the sun, and me, some pale thing, from deep within a cave, as blind as—“ Sarastro pressed a hand over his mouth, stopped him.

“If you cannot understand,” he said, “then let me show you.”

Hesiod let him, unable, unsure, _unwilling_ to say no. He wanted this, wanted it desperately, but he wasn’t, did not feel, like he was worthy of it. Sarastro thought he was. And so, he let the other man turn him to a blossom, a daylily faced desperately toward the sun, peeling him layer by layer from his clothes, until they were both naked together. Men of their age especially had no need to feel shame before one another, but Hesiod still wished to tuck his knees to his chest and hide away, even as Sarastro leaned over him, as they kissed, their fingers tangling, their ankles knocking.

“It’s good,” Sarastro laughed, leaning up on his elbows, his hair frizzing with the humidity of their sweat, knotted and tangled about both their faces. “We’re like a matched set.”

Hesiod snorted. “What,” he replied, nudging at the other man’s ankle with his toes, sliding his palm up his arm even as Sarastro’s fingers counted the indents, the curves between his sunken ribs, “Because I’m tall and thin and you’re short and fat?” He got a gut-laugh at that, their foreheads pressed together, Sarastro’s smile-wrinkles worn soft with how wide he was grinning.

“You cannot truly look at me and say I am _short_.” He was of average height; it was not Hesiod’s fault he was himself so tall.

“In comparison.”

“In comparison to you, everyone is short.” Hesiod hummed; he had a point. He stood head and shoulders taller than almost everyone he knew, his gangling limbs and long hands and horse-face sticking out in any crowd. “And compared to you, everyone is fat.” His ribs were all visible, countable, his stomach concave and his sternum an indent in his chest. Sarastro, who had only put on more weight as he had aged, filled up all the open places Hesiod’s strange, skinny body left behind, the swell of his stomach matching the dip of Hesiod’s own. There was less, therefore, Hesiod could jab him with, because he had the fat to protect him from it. A few elbows to the chest or stomach hurt far less for someone with actual weight than they did for Hesiod.

“You’re perfect,” Hesiod said, like that meant anything. And Sarastro kissed him.

In time, he spread his thighs. In time, Sarastro’s cock got hard, nudged against the underside of his stomach, against Hesiod’s clit, pressing between his folds. “I must apologise,” he murmured, grey eyes blown wide and sweat plastering his fine golden hair to his temples, “I’ve never been with another man, I don’t know—“ it was Hesiod’s turn to laugh, like he was the average man, with the scars on his chest and no penis between his legs.

“What you’re doing is fine,” he murmured, tugging Sarastro back closer, pressing himself up against the underside of his dick, grinding his own wetness back into the hot, hard, slick skin of the other man’s length. “That is more than fine.”

It was, perhaps, not stars and dawn light. The earth did not move. It was more simply just sex, good sex, but sex. There was little poetry. When Hesiod came he dug his fingers into Sarastro’s sheets, ground his hips up and up to ride the friction on his clit, biting at Sarastro’s lower lip, and when Sarastro came it was with a crack and a cry in his low voice, shuddering over him, spilling in hot stripes over the base of his stomach, face pressed to his shoulder. And after, sweat growing cold on their bodies, arms and legs tangled in gordian knots, they lay in the afterglow and spoke of little nothings, strangely at peace.

Eventually dawn cracked the horizon, and the first honey-yellow drips of it painted across the sheets, turning them, and their tangled legs, crimson. Hesiod watched it, watched as it lit Sarastro’s dark skin up with heat and warmth, brought out ochre and umber, while it just made him look ever-paler. Pale, but yellowed. Nearly jaundiced.

He did not deserve this, he knew. He, with his knobby knees and his all-wrong body and his too-much chin. But together like this he felt, for the first time, not quite so out of place. “What a pair we do make,” he said, more musing to himself than speaking to Sarastro, the other man drowsing on his shoulder, strands of his hair sticking to Hesiod’s lips, one palm flattened over his hipbones and the base of his stomach, fingertips nestled in his sparse pubic hair. “You, the sun. I, merely the moon and a cold, pale imitation of your radiance.”

“You aren’t the moon,” Sarastro replied, voice hoarse and grating with sleep. “I’ve known her, and your beauty is nothing as to hers.” Hesiod closed his eyes, pained even at the knowledge the admission was true. Perhaps Sarastro found him beauteous for his brain, for the silver of his tongue, for his loyalty, but his body was certainly no draw. “No,” Sarastro continued, “I do not mean that you are ugly. I hate that you think it. I mean...” he hesitated, breath a hot brand over Hesiod’s collarbones, and then he sat up, rolled so all Hesiod could see was his back, and the hundred thousand little glass scars that peppered his shoulders and neck and spine in little faint lines the colour of fresh wheat. “The moon is more beautiful than anyone, but she is so cold. It’s not for us. The moon for the sea and the other things that live there, for the stars and the galaxy. The moon is beautiful, aye, but she is cold, and she lights the night only out of duty, not out of love.”

Sarastro turned around, and Hesiod felt like shrivelling beneath that gaze that saw so efficiently through him like through a looking glass, cut him apart to the quick and further, sawed right down to the secret, shameful heart of him, that was _jealous_ almost that he had met this man so late. That someone had seen him sooner. That someone had _hurt_ him sooner.

How petty and childish. But how he longed to not have come into the book of Sarastro’s life long after the first chapters had been closed behind lock and key.

“You’re dew—you say you are mundane; that you need to be overlooked, that you are not worth finding anywhere. But you harken in the dawn, you glitter beyond any light I have ever known. I _wish_ you could see yourself the way I do, Hesiod. I wish you could see the beauty I see.” Sarastro smiled, a little sadly. “Never compare yourself to the moon. I’d not see you taken from me and hung in the heavens for all the gold and jewels as there are stars in the sky.”

And then he leaned back down, and Hesiod met him, hungry and grasping, to kiss, and kiss, and kiss in the warm dawn light, their lovemaking as slow as the waking of the world.

 

 

It was in the waning months of her time in the Temple, her girlhood long-outgrown, that Pamina began to come to the Speaker, skirting the walls and doors of his office, looking for what he could only assume were answers to her many questions. At first, he had replied by gently directing her toward Sarastro, for his knowledge was ever greater than Hesiod’s own, but soon he began to understand that she came to him not for answers to her questions, but for answers to her feeling of loss, in a world that left her cut adrift from all that she had known before. He knew a little of that.

It was one such day, Pamina bundled into a chair in the corner of his office, the curtains open to spill sunlight over her dark hair, picking up the golden tones amidst the black, that she closed her book with a snap. “Why?” She asked, rhetorically, of the room at large.

“A great many men have tried to answer that,” the Speaker replied, turning the page of accounting he was reading, finger paused on the column in place. “Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Lao Tzu...”

“No,” Pamina huffed, annoyed. “Why does Sarastro want me here so much? Why does he hate my mother? What does he think I have to be here for?”

“Whatever is between your mother and My Lord is for them, and them alone. In all our years of acquaintance, he has never once mentioned it to me.” Hesiod set down his pen. “I’ve small hope he ever shall, as you have no doubt learned.” She grunted. “But my understanding is that he believes he owes some debt to your father, and is insistent that there is something that waits for you here that is greater than that which awaits you with your mother.” He looked at her, raised his eyebrows. “You cannot in troth say it has been all bad, can you? You are free to roam, to make use of the library, to speak and go whence you will.” She had spent the better part of the last year away, staying in villages, learning how to weave magic into baskets, how to spin the rays of the sun into thread and cloth. “You have met many whom you would not have otherwise crossed paths with.”

“But I cannot go _home_.” She spoke so wistfully of it; that place in the dark, devoid of sun. “The one place I wish to return to. I’m not a child any more.” Indeed, she was now over twenty, her years with them passing in breaths and blinks. “How can he still be my guardian when I am a girl no longer, an adult _he_ insists must make her own decisions?” Her face was tight and drawn; it reminded the Speaker of the moue Sarastro wore when he said something particularly self-disparaging. “How can he deny me freedom of my own. I thought the point of Wisdom was to be able to make use of it, not rot in a cage.”

“If freedom from our Order is what you should wish, none shall adjudge you for it.” He smiled at her. “Certainly not I. Sarastro and I are not united in all things, and I...” he hesitated.

He knew what it was like, to leave without ever bidding farewell. He still knew not if his parents knew he yet lived. He would never know. That was the trade he had made, to be who he was. His family was the Order, now, the acolytes his children, the brothers both sworn and blood.

“I believe it should be up to you to choose,” he told her. He did not bother to mince words. “You are old enough to. The choice should be yours, and the consequences yours as well. For that is what it means to be your own person. For good or ill.” She stared at him, in surprise. He shrugged. “Think on it, Your Highness. If Sarastro took you, despite objections, he did so for a reason, regardless of if it is one you agree with or not. Of that much, I am certain. If you choose to do what you wilt, and unto you comes grief as well as joy, that is the choice you face.”

“If he truly thought something was horrible for me from whence I came, he would have told me. He _should_ have.” Pamina sniffed. “I bear no fear to going to my mother. I... miss her.” Terribly; Hesiod knew.

He stood, went to the girl, knelt beside her, and smiled. “And return you shall, if and when you are ready.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Come with me to dinner.”

 

 

It was the last such conversation he had with Pamina, for within the month she demanded her release from her guardianship; a long-overdue freedom. Sarastro looked both frightened and hopeful by turns. His hold over her, barring her from the darkness out of which he had carried her years before, dissipated by the day, magic bound to her childhood banished by the choice of adulthood. It was on one of those early days that Hesiod awoke when Sarastro almost tripped on him getting out of bed, the other man’s curls wild around his face, a hand clutched to his chest, fingers searching for the Sevenfold Disc, removed and set on the bedside table while he slept.

“Mmm?” Hesiod questioned, one eye cracked, watching the other man stumble nude around his bedroom, finger-combing his hair into some semblance of propriety, pulling on his nightshirt rather than mess with the ties of his breeches, snatching up the Disc. When he raced out into his office, Hesiod scrambled out of bed after him. “Sarastro?”

“Pamina!” He gasped, turning toward Hesiod, his skin grey and his grey eyes pale with fright, so wide that visible all the way around them was the whites. “She’s going back!”

Hesiod, still more asleep than awake, scrubbed at his eyes, bleary, unfocused words a mush within his mouth. “What do you mean—“

“She’s trying to go back,” Sarastro breathed, his deep voice shaking like a leafless tree in winter, rattling like the bones of death, “to her mother.”

In hindsight, the clues had been there, as clear as the dawning of the day. They had been all-but-writ before his eyes—and Hesiod had, throughout his fifty-some-odd years, always prided himself a smart man. Yet he had not seen this, despite the warning signs. He had not looked deeper than he wished to see, for he did _not_ wish to see. He wanted still the life he had always known, a match and equal beside the man with whom he had inadvertently found he was sharing his twilight days.

He did not wish to learn of dark secrets, hidden for the better part of twenty years. But learn them he must, for our wishes are not always our own. And sometimes—

(“Oh,” Hesiod said, his face creased with regret for all those years he had stood staunchly beside Sarastro, questioning internally all that he had espoused as his reason for Pamina being forced to stay in the Temple of Wisdom when she wished more than anything to go back to her mother, “if only Sarastro laid before you the reason for his action!” If only Sarastro laid it before them _all_ , rather than keep them guessing at shadows. Fate and power and passion and the will of her absent father were all good, but that last conversation with Pamina had stuck with him in a way that had left him reeling, the axis of his life struck forever from how it had once turned.

Hesiod, too, once had longed for home. He could no more fault Pamina as he could fault himself. For Tamino, chosen Prince and saviour, spoke the truth, she had been stolen from her mother, and had cried out in agony. How fitting indeed the Queen sent someone to take her daughter back!)

Sometimes the world must show us what we miss, regardless if we wish to see it. That long-ago rooftop conversation, Sarastro looking up into his eyes and speaking of his duty to the fallen King, his promise to raise Pamina, was so much more than he had known then. That conversation in his office one day, the question, the philosophy of fatherhood for the father or for the child, had been even then one that should have left a question upon his slack lips. Hesiod, trustworthy to a fault, had taken it at face value. He had believed. He had wanted to believe.

(“Does he possess virtue?” The Speaker asked him, and their eyes met among the other elders of their order. “Discretion, too? Is he charitable?”

“The virtuous Pamina has been destined by the gods for Tamino; it was for this reason that I seized her from her mother.” That was not what Sarastro had said so many years before; he had hinted, almost-knowing. Perhaps he himself had not known. The Speaker liked it not, even if Pamina had found she loved this Prince after so little an encounter; was it not just another choice made for her? How should anyone but Pamina make that decision. How could Sarastro think he could see this future, the best possible outcome?

How could Sarastro have spent near twenty years speaking of the future that Pamina had before her, if that future was merely servitude bound in matrimony to another man? How could he be certain of that being the best for her? Why could her mother not, too, have known?)

The Speaker had been through their Trials, long before, when he had been only as just-yet a man, his name fitting him strangely, his clothes not cut right. He had been led by priests into the depths of the Temple of Wisdom, and sat for the prescribed three days and three nights in silent agony, at the screams of his lost family, their shouts of vitriol and hate, imagined or no.

The Speaker had borne it, as he would bear all such else in his life. He had known then what it was, as mist and phantasms and nothing more, and learned during his time the truth that awaited him in the Order, the wisdom he so sought. He had watched the shreds of his life before, the one he had tossed away as did all priests of the Sun, and not wondered even for a moment if the thing he was doing was _right_.

He had been freed of them, in that crucible. It did the same for all others who passed through. It was meant to, for the weak could not survive as did the strong in the Order. _Truth_ was a heavy thing. Depended upon the speaker, the viewer, aye; heavy nevertheless. There was something inescapable about the truth. That which bore the brunt of honesty could never be escaped.

(“Give me your hands,” he said to Tamino and Papageno, with a gravity he was not sure he could marshal and possess, when he felt so behind his breast in turmoil. He clasped their fingers in his own, committed their faces to memory as he had the faces of all those who had gone on within the cloisters, a last sight either should they perish or should they come out born anew. Someone must remember their last moments of the life before. “So be it! The gods impose a salutary silence on you, too, Prince: without it you are both lost! You will see Pamina—but never be allowed to speak to her! This is the beginning of your trials.”

So different from his own. Yet so much the same. How many words could you long to share with a loved one, lost to you for eternity? How great could be your desire to mend bridges?

The truth was a heavy burden.

To hold it meant knowing when not to speak it, for it could crack the foundation of a lesser human like uneven ground and weak paving stone, and the crack could spread through you like brushfire. Not easily were the weak inducted into their Order; even greater was the difficulty for the strong.)

He had stood behind Sarastro’s back for what felt like years beyond counting. Had watched him age from a golden man in the prime of youth to a verdigris-encrusted scabbard, blade within still sharp but to the outer world beginning to dull, his looks and fine enamel and metalwork damaged almost beyond repair. Sarastro was still the same man but he was _changed,_ in a fundamental way, from the one who had come first to their halls.

He stood behind Sarastro, that afternoon when Tamino crawled fire-forged from his trials, and knelt before them, to undertake the final steps. He stood behind Sarastro, and saw Pamina offer before him the Magic Flute, carved in the depths of a storm.

He remembered that storm. It had been a gale that had howled so great it had nearly battered down the walls of the Temple of Wisdom, the crash of the thunder so loud it had near-deafened him and all who lived it. He remembered the feel after it was over, like something momentous had occurred from which they could never step back.

And he saw, then, and he understood. He understood the signs he had not wanted to see. The long-ago conversations; the fear of a father cut-loose of family ties. The Sevenfold Disc. The thrones, traded for brick. The grey of their eyes, as alike as two sides of a coin. Her hair, curling at the ends, gentle as the white foam of the sea upon a breezy day. They had the same hands; nimble but with square fingers, meant for work not as lofty as the future that had found them and their present lives had constructed for them.

They had the same smile. To have it turned upon you was to feel the heat of the warm sun on the worst of a winter’s day, sinking in past your skin and your muscles, down to your bones and viscera, to alight you from the inside. To bask in the heat of their smile was to know the fullness that plants felt, the knowledge that man, in the face of such an expression, could feed on sunlight and water alone.

They smiled at each other then, and he Knew that which before he had Not Known, and felt his foundation crack, like paving stones. He felt himself uproot as his trunk was pulled free of the earth. He crumbled like brick to dust below the banishment of time. Burned like a fire in the hearth.

Ashes, ashes.

 

 

And when the Queen of the Night stormed the Order, and Monostatos and the Ladies fell, and the dust settled:

The Queen was a shattered woman, when he first knew her. She was a Pamina drained of life and light, trembling as did leaves in the gusting winds of fall. She shook, her hands grasping at nothings, her eyes seeing shades and ghosts. Her once-dark hair was the same pale grey as Sarastro’s eyes, and her wheat-sheaf skin was now less as gold and more as brittle gleanings, dried to husks by too many hours rotting in the sun.

He did not wish she had died, with Monostatos and her Ladies, failing the trials. No; she did not deserve that, for her actions were those of a mother scorned and a woman wronged. They were no better nor worse than those of her former husband. She had been robbed of her child, of her future. But yet he could not conscience her living either, for he had seen what she had done with magic and words both, the shambling corpse Sarastro had come to the Order as. He had seen just what her rampant jealousy could do when unfettered. How very nearly she had crushed Pamina to dust under her hateful fist.

He still did not know if she was right. If she was wrong. He did not think that by rights, he ever would. He did not think it was his decision to make; he had no basis from which to either slander or support her. He had been but a bit-player in the dissolution of a marriage that had taken twenty years, and he had found himself deeply in love with some of what it had produced, for all the good it had done him.

Pamina and Tamino, arm in arm, in a union founded by word if not in deed, left to visit his father. After all; a Prince marrying into the Queendom of a Princess, leaving his hereditary family, was not the usual way of things. But he, through Pamina, ruled two kingdoms now, Night reunited at last under their Princess, and in their wake left the shattered corpse of the _something_ that he had held, for too-short a time.

It was that morning, after their departure, the last shreds of false dawn chased away by the rays of the sun, that he saw them together. They were in the peristyle garden that, once before, he had walked with Sarastro, arm in arm. Sarastro was pushing the Queen, small and convalescent within her chair, and their voices (high and low, soaring and falling, a chorus of matching depth and arching buttresses) carried to him as little more than a whisper, their words lost to the wind. Their privacy remained; he would not disrupt.

They did not look happy, but they looked at peace. They stood together, the Queen’s head beside Sarastro’s dark hands, staring up at him with her dark eyes, their past ghosts finally, for the last, banished. Their peace, restored. Or something like it.

 

 

He had never officially moved into Sarastro’s rooms. It had been a near-enough thing; it was known by everyone, but he had retained the rooms he had kept for the better part of his life. It was still startling just how many of his things had shifted from room to room in those few years. Shoes, placed beside Sarastro’s upon the mat by the door. His shirts hanging in the closet, his trousers folded at the foot of the bed. His breeches unlaced and waiting for a patch on the desk. Books, bookmarks, razors. Combs. An extra pair of glasses.

He was sure there was near as much of Sarastro’s in his own rooms, but that was for another day. Not now, not today, not when he felt strangely raw, like he had nicked himself when shaving all over. He had gathered up all his things and placed them together on the made bed, atop the blankets he had come to know as his own, when he heard the doors to the chambers open; heralding Sarastro’s efficient, straightforward steps. There was the sound of him grunting as he bent to loosen his boots, the gentle _tack_ of a book upon his desk in his office, and then the door to the bedroom creaked.

He hung his head.

It was very quiet.

“Hesiod?” Sarastro’s voice had that same tone it had held that day when they had walked through the garden. “Is something amiss?” He stared, unseeing, at the coat folded in his hands, his thumb brushing across the wool, over the collar and the buttons. It was plainer than Sarastro’s, and worn with years of use. He had others, in better shape than this one, a uniform as alike to him as was a friend, but this one, comfortable from years of use, was almost like a friend.

The door, very quietly, its hinges a near-whisper, swung shut.

“Why did you not tell me?” The words felt leadened and deadened upon his tongue. He could not bear to bring himself to turn around. “Why did you keep it from me, for so many years?” He sighed, let the coat go, tried to straighten his hunched shoulders. “Were you afraid of what I would say? Did you want me to know you simply as you are now, and not as you were then? Why, when you brought her, did you not say, _my daughter_ instead of _the princess_?” He was staring out the window over Sarastro’s bed, but his eyes were unseeing.

He felt oddly hollow.

“Why, Sarastro?” The name felt now as ill-fitting, tailored to a form and figure that was not the one he had come to known, as did his own name. _Hesiod_ had never been quite right; the concept that he needed a name had never been truly one he felt safe with. Sarastro had always felt right, but now, it felt strangely disconnected from the image that he had in his mind. ( _Helios_ , his mind supplied, _Apollo Helios_ , but he knew that too was wrong.) “Do I truly matter so little?”

Sarastro sighed.

“Can you truly blame me for wishing to excise the past?” He did not speak; his silence was answer enough. He could not any more blame Sarastro than he could blame himself. “I had hoped that the wounds would stay closed forever, rather than reopen as the years passed over them.” His footsteps came closer, and he could feel Sarastro’s presence behind him, his body heat as hot as the burn and steam from coals. “I wanted you to know me as I am, yes, but too...”

“The past is the past,” he whispered, filling the words Sarastro left hanging unspoken. “And we are no more the people we were then as we are yet the people we will be tomorrow. I know what it is you wish to say.” He straightened the rest of the way at last, and turned to look down at Sarastro, who watched him back.

He was growing old. They both were. So many had already died of late; how did he know that Sarastro would not be next? That he would not?

“I do not wish for you to relive a past that you, by all rights, are free of.” He could not meet the other man’s eyes; could not bear to see himself in that silver mirror. “But I wish to know _you_ , and all entailed within. You have kept secrets from me, pains that still do linger.” He shook his head. “Man, too, can err, Sarastro. There was, I thought, nothing between us, a promise for trust that I believed implicit.”

Sarastro closed his eyes, in pain, and he breathed a little easier for it. It was not as difficult, when he did not have to watch them watch him.

“I should never have kept from you as a lie,” Sarastro said, at long last, his mouth barely moving around the words. “I have hurt you.”

“You have.” He did not deny it, but he did not, either, deny the hand that Sarastro reached from him, taking it in his own. His own skin had liver spots, Sarastro’s was starting to crack with age. They were both growing older. Twilight was all that remained before them; noon had gone behind. “But I know you did not intend as such.” Sarastro’s lips flickered into a smile; it trembled, and fell. “But so too am I not sure if this bruise within me is ready to heal.” He paused.

He had it on his lips, to say, _and if not me, when will Pamina forgive you?_ But he knew. He knew. She would, like as not, never do so. She had _accepted_ him, but forgive him? He doubted such words would pass her lips before her father went to his grave, in such due course as mortality dictated. When he passed her the Sevenfold Disc, as he would, and she took it and rose up, as she would, what then would become between them?

“I need time,” he said at last. “I know not how much.” Sarastro nodded. “But know my affection for you is no lesser than it ever has been.” The other man looked up at him then, his eyes bright behind his glasses, and he smiled. There it was; that radiant dawn. “I should like nothing more nor less than to spend the rest of my days beside you, in this as in all things.” He would need time on his own, to heal, to come to terms, to accept all that which he had seen and experienced in these recent days. But then...

Hesiod cupped the other man’s cheeks in his hands, and bowed his head, so that together their foreheads pressed, to stare into his eyes. “I am your Speaker,” he said, and he could hear his own voice as he spoke it, echoing with power in the word. “And beside you I shall remain, until death do us part.” He hesitated. “If you shall have me.”

“If you should wish it,” Sarastro replied, his voice ajar, a cracked door, on the verge of collapse.

* * *

 

וַיָּרַע הָעָם וַיִּתְקְעוּ בַּשֹּׁפָרוֹת וַיְהִי כִשְׁמֹעַ הָעָם אֶת קוֹל הַשּׁוֹפָר וַיָּרִיעוּ הָעָם תְּרוּעָה גְדוֹלָה וַתִּפֹּל הַחוֹמָה תַּחְתֶּיהָ וַיַּעַל הָעָם הָעִירָה אִישׁ נֶגְדּוֹ וַיִּלְכְּדוּ אֶת הָעִיר:

And the people shouted, and (the priests) blew with the trumpets; and it was when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, that the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down in its place and the people went up into the city, every man opposite him, and they took the city.

(Joshua 6:20)

**Author's Note:**

> twitter and tumblr @ jonphaedrus


End file.
